Can any animal other than humans reason?

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I'd love to know the answer to that too, so I'll be interested in what everyone else thinks. I'm truly not sure, some animals seem to be able to figure some things out.

For example, I read an article in People magazine a while back about a pod of dolphins who surrounded some swimmers off the coast of New Zealand and herded the swimmers to shore. The swimmers were concerned that the dolphins were crowding them but once they got near shore the swimmers saw a large shark swimming just outside the dolphins that surrounded them. So did the dolphins 'think'? I don't know. But they were smart enough to save a group of swimmers from a very possible shark attack.

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Certainly.

As just mentioned in another thread, there is a view that all things of existence reflect the qualities of God, and that includes the ability of thought. I've seen videos of birds making tools and fishing out food and such.

But does that equate with using a machine to rescue burried miners? One wonders if some animals are higher than others - dolphin resuces for example.... On the other hand I wonder if dolphin rescues say more about us than they do about dolphins? I mean that one does not hear about dolphin rescues of seals or baby whales (also targets of sharks.) Hmmm...

I note that there is no inherent definition I've read in scriptures that the human soul is tied to having two legs, using opposable thumbs, with a tendency to speak....

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I see no basis for believing that animals other than humans can NOT reason.

There is all sorts of evidence of problem solving in animals, which would give me the suggestion that annimals do, indeed, reason. Much of their behavior is beyond instinct, but social and purposeful.

Most definitely.

I've heard from a few science majors who feel animals work only on instinct but have no ability to think.

Anyone who has a pet can tell you otherwise. Sure, I think all creatures have natural instinct. But I believe we also have thought.

The fact that my dog mopes around the second he sees my suitcases shows me that he knows it means I'm leaving for a few days.

Every Sunday when I get back from the gym, we go for a walk. I'm not in the house two minutes when he starts jumping around ready to go. And he drives me nuts until we finally get into the car. He knows. I don't know how he distinguises the days of the week and realizes that today is "walk day", but he does. But, he even takes it a step further. If it's raining outside, he doesn't bother me, cause he knows he doesn't like to walk in the rain. In the winter, he stops bugging me, cause he knows it's too cold.

I could list thousands of things he does that shows thought processes.

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Yes. That answer was too short, but it's the concise feel I was going for.

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Bird brains!

"It is obvious to some people that birds have intelligent behavior. It has been proven in scientific studies and in everyday observation over many years. In fact, an argument can be made that having a brain means that you have intelligent behavior, regardless of whether you are a bird, mammal, reptile, or otherwise. But this is not the way many people think. There is something inherent in our human psyche that wants to make nonhumans "lower" in intelligence, and for us to form a scale of intelligence such that some species would be considered not intelligent. This is the source of the terms lower and higher animals.

In fact, it is very difficult or almost impossible to make such a scale. Yes, a crow can make tools, and as far as I know, this has not been observed in pigeons. But pigeons have incredible visual memories and abilities, including the ability to learn how to distinguish different styles of impressionistic paintings. Chickadees, which are a type of songbird, can store over 3,000 seeds in the forest, and during the winter they remember where they put them and retrieve most of them. A parrot so far as I know has not been observed to do this, yet a number of parrot species can imitate some human speech.

So what is the answer? Different species have different behavioral capacities that vary in sophistication. Part of the sophistication is controlled by the size of the brain area that controls that behavior relative to the size of the rest of the brain; chickadees have a larger hippocampus than other birds, which they use for food- storing behavior. However, brain size is not the main driving factor behind these complex behaviors. Instead, neural connectivity appears to be the driving force. Parrots and other vocal learning birds have forebrain connections to motor neurons of the brainstem for controlling production of sounds. Nonvocal learning species do not have this connection from the forebrain, regardless of how big or small the size of their brain. This is still an area of active research, and it may be something you would be interested in studying one day."NovaNow online response to a post

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I certainly believe that they do. There is too much behavior that I've seen that couldn't be really explained, otherwise.